Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Biography
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born
in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the
university town of Nsukka where she attended primary and secondary schools and
briefly studied Medicine and Pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to
attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State with a
major in Communication and a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters
degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African
Studies from Yale.
Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was also short-listed for the Orange Prize and
the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and long-listed for the Booker Prize. Her short
fiction has appeared in Granta, Prospect, and The Iowa
Review among other literary journals, and she received an O. Henry Prize in
2003. She was a 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, where she taught
Introductory Fiction.
Her second novel,
Half of a Yellow Sun, is set before and during the Biafran War. It was
published in August 2006 in the United Kingdom and in September 2006 in the
United States.
Her collection of short stories, The Thing around Your Neck, was
published in 2009.
In 2009 she said that her next major literary project will focus on the Nigerian immigrant
experience in the United States. In 2010 she was listed in The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" Fiction Issue.
She divides her time between the United
States and Nigeria.
This biography was last updated on 10/10/2012.
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